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History Claims Her Artwork, but She Wants It Back

Dina Babbitt, a Holocaust survivor, in Felton, Calif., at work on a new portrait of a Gypsy woman she had painted in 1944 at Auschwitz.

FELTON, Calif. — At 83, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt still recalls the rickety easel where in 1944, under orders from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, she painted watercolors of the haggard faces of Gypsy prisoners.

But her memories of the Auschwitz concentration camp, vivid though they are, aren’t enough for Mrs. Babbitt. Seven of the 11 portraits that saved Mrs. Babbitt and her mother remain not far from where she created them, on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland.

“They are definitely my own paintings; they belong to me, my soul is in them, and without these paintings I wouldn’t be alive, my children and grandchildren wouldn’t be alive,” Mrs. Babbitt said with a Czech accent as she served schnitzel in her cottage here in the hills outside Santa Cruz. “I created them. Who else’s could they be?”

Her three-decade effort to retrieve them, which has stagnated for years, is drawing renewed interest this summer as a heart problem threatening Mrs. Babbitt’s health reinvigorates her supporters’ efforts to resolve the dispute.

Shelley Berkley, a Democratic representative of Nevada — Mrs. Babbitt’s daughter lives in Las Vegas — testified about the case in July at a Congressional hearing into the recovery of art stolen during World War II. And more recently a letter to the Auschwitz museum was signed by 13 artists, art dealers and museum curators, including a former executive director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Reuniting Mrs. Babbitt with her paintings would be a sign of the museum’s dedication not only to history but also to humanity,” said the letter, which was organized by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Philadelphia.

The Auschwitz museum, which considers the watercolors to be its property, has argued that they are rare artifacts and important evidence of the Nazi genocide, part of the cultural heritage of the world. Teresa Swiebocka, the museum’s deputy director, wrote by e-mail that the portraits “serve important documentary and educational functions as a part of the permanent exhibition” about the murder of thousands of Gypsy, or Roma, victims. The portraits, she added, “are on permanent exhibition, although they have to be rotated to preserve them, since they are watercolors on paper.”

She added that “we do not regard these as personal artistic creations but as documentary work done under direct orders from Dr. Mengele and carried out by the artist to ensure her survival.”

In a statement issued in 2001, she noted, the memorial’s international council asserted that six of the original watercolors had been purchased by the museum in 1963 from an Auschwitz survivor, and that the seventh was acquired in 1977.

Photo

Dina Babbitt and her mother, Johanna Gottlieb, in Nice after the war.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Mrs. Babbitt’s case is unusual among the property disputes to emerge from the Holocaust because it involves artwork created under the duress of Nazis, not property confiscated by the Nazis.

“You have the natural dilemma between something that is clearly significant historical documentation of events and the claim of someone, which can’t be dismissed outright, that this was her creative work,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee, a lobbyist group, and a member of the International Auschwitz Council, which advises the museum. “I don’t know of a case quite like it.”

Dina Gottliebova was a 19-year-old art student in Prague in 1942 when she first went to a concentration camp. In September 1943 she and her mother, Johanna, were moved to Auschwitz, where she tried to cheer the imprisoned children by painting a mural of a Swiss mountainside and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

The work drew the attention of Mengele, whose experiments sought scientific evidence to support Nazi racial theories. Frustrated that photographs did not accurately depict Gypsy skin tones, Mrs. Babbitt said, he wanted her to paint them.

Mengele singled her out, Mrs. Babbitt recalled, in March 1944, on a day when thousands of other prisoners were being taken to be exterminated. She said that she demanded of Mengele that he also spare her mother or she would commit suicide by touching an electrified fence. She and her mother were among the 27 Czechoslovak Jews to survive from their group of more than 5,000.

Her first subject was a Gypsy woman named Celine, who had recently lost her newborn to starvation. Celine is shown with a scarf covering her shaved head and one ear protruding, Mrs. Babbitt said, because Mengele linked the shape of Gypsy ears to inferiority.

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After two months of painting — she believes that she did 11 portraits — all of the camp’s Gypsies were killed. Then she was forced to paint medical procedures for Mengele.

Mrs. Babbitt and her mother survived internment in two more concentration camps before liberation in May 1945.

After the war she pursued work as an animator in Paris and was hired by the American who would become her husband, Art Babbitt. They married, moved to California and had two daughters. The Babbitts divorced in 1962, and Mrs. Babbitt returned to animation, working on characters like Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote and Cap’n Crunch.

In 1973 the Auschwitz museum told her that the watercolors had survived. The curators had determined that she was the artist by comparing her signature — “Dina 1944” — to the ones on artworks she had done shortly after the war for a book on the Holocaust.

Photo

These are among the portraits owned by the Auschwitz museum. Josef Mengele wanted Dina Babbitt to document what he saw as Gypsy features.Credit
Courtesy of Dina Babbitt

The artist borrowed money to fly to Poland to authenticate the work, carrying a briefcase that she planned to use to take the watercolors home. When museum officials refused to give them to her, the long-running dispute began.

Negotiations seemed promising in the late 1990’s when Rabbi Baker and others tried to arrange compromises. Mrs. Babbitt rejected a suggestion that the museum lend the art to her for the remainder of her life; she said she wanted ownership and the right to hang the works in an American museum.

“She wanted all or nothing,” said Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former State Department official who mediated the talks. “I understood that, but in these kinds of claims, where you don’t have clarity in terms of legal doctrine, you have to work out these kinds of compromises.”

The Auschwitz museum has also wavered on compromise proposals; it was unwilling to give up just a portion of the works for fear of setting a precedent under which other survivors could claim additional artifacts on display.

“Nearly every item left or contributed to the museum in Auschwitz-Birkenau could be claimed by a rightful owner as personal property,” wrote the Polish ambassador to the United States in 2001, Przemyslaw Grudzinski, in a letter to Ms. Berkley. “Should they be returned?”

Ms. Berkley, one of Mrs. Babbitt’s strongest advocates, helped pass a resolution in 2002 that directed the State Department to work toward securing the paintings for Mrs. Babbitt. Ms. Berkley said in a telephone interview that she had also raised the issue with the president of Poland when she visited a few years ago.

“The Auschwitz museum has a lofty goal not to dismantle the museum,” she said. “I can relate to that. The Roma people have a stake in it because it’s their images. But to Dina, this is her life. This is the life of her mother.”

The museum insists that it respects Mrs. Babbitt’s position, informing her regularly about the status of the material and asking her permission whenever the works are to be reproduced or published. To Mrs. Babbitt, this is an acknowledgment that the museum recognizes that the works belong to her.

Displayed on an easel in her cottage is her attempt to repaint the Gypsy woman Celine as the young woman might have wanted to be painted — with longer hair and without her ear protruding from her scarf. But it’s not the same as having the original portrait.

“Every single thing, including our underwear, was taken away from us,” Mrs. Babbitt said. “Everything we owned, ever. My dog, our furniture, our clothes. And now, finally, something is found that I created, that belongs to me. And they refuse to give it to me. This is why I feel the same helplessness as I did then.”

Al Horne contributed reporting for this article from Paris.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: History Claims Her Artwork, but She Wants It Back. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe